Monday, February 20, 2012

Cover Girl

Not sure how that happened and why, but in January I was approached by the Pere ja Kodu ("Family and Home"), the biggest family magazine published in Estonia. They asked if I'd be willing to be interviewed for the cover story of their February issue. I must admit I was pretty baffled - me? I know that my Estonian recipe site is popular (I get about 3000 unique visitors each day), that the two cookbooks have done well, that my regular monthly recipe column in Postimees, my one-week stint cooking on the breakfast show at the national television (I'll blog about that soon, promise!), and numerous radio interviews mean that many people would recognise the Nami-Nami name quite well. Still, cooking and writing about the food is something I do in the privacy and intimacy of my own home, for my close friends and dear family, so it's sometimes hard to comprehend that it's actually not so private and intimate after all.

A three-hour interview with a lovely journalist and two photo-shoots with an even lovelier photographer resulted in a nice long article and some pretty glamorous family photos :) The article doesn't talk about cooking as such. Instead it focuses on balancing family life, academic career and my cooking hobby; on my attempts to involve kids in the cooking process and developing a healthy relationship to food and eating; on baby-led weaning (a topic very close to my heart); on keeping and sustaining family harmony (of a kind that's possible with two tiny lively kids); and on my appreciation of the Estonian social welfare system that lets me stay at home for about 18 months with each kid (keeping my full salary).

So if you read Estonian, and want to learn more about all that, go to your nearest newspaper stand and get the February 2012 issue of Pere and Kodu :)

Pille - beautiful cover, gorgeous kids. You are very lucky to live in a country that values Mothers; we are a hated species here in the United States, I am sad to say. Best of luck to you, and I hope to someday see our country treat its future citizens (children) better, by treating their parents better.